Suddenly Last Summer

Suddenly Last Summer is a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It opened off Broadway on January 7, 1958, as part of a double bill with another of Williams' one-acts, Something Unspoken (written in 1958). The presentation of the two plays was given the overall title Garden District, but Suddenly Last Summer is now more often performed alone. Williams said he thought the play "perhaps the most poetic" he had written, and Harold Bloom ranks it among the best examples of the playwright's lyricism.

Plot:
1936, in the Garden District of New Orleans. Mrs. Violet Venable, an elderly widow from a prominent local family, has invited a doctor to her home. She talks nostalgically about her son Sebastian, a poet who died under mysterious circumstances in Spain the previous summer. During the course of their conversation, she offers to make a generous donation to support the doctor's psychiatric research if he will perform a lobotomy on Catharine, her niece, who has been confined to a private mental asylum at her expense since returning to America. Mrs. Venable is eager to "shut her up" once and for all, as she continues to "babble" about Sebastian's violent death and "smash" her son's reputation by hinting at his homosexuality.

Catharine arrives, followed by her impecunious mother and brother. They are also eager to suppress her version of events, since Mrs. Venable is threatening to keep Sebastian's will in probate until she is satisfied. But the doctor injects Catharine with a truth serum and she proceeds to give a scandalous account of Sebastian's moral dissolution and the events leading up to his death, how he used her to "procure" young men for his sexual exploitation, and how he was set upon, mutilated and partially "devoured" by a mob of starving children in the street. Mrs. Venable launches herself at Catharine but she is prevented from striking her and taken off stage, screaming "cut this hideous story from her brain!" Far from being convinced of her insanity, however, the doctor believes her story could in fact be true.